First Lady Melania Trump was less than pleased when she heard that her husband’s alleged former fling, porn actress Stormy Daniels, would be featured in an upcoming edition of Vogue.“Annie Leibovitz shot the porn hooker, and she will be in one of the issues,” Trump told her then-friend Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, in a July 2018 conversation that Winston Wolkoff secretly recorded, according to Hollywood Life.At first, Winston Wolkoff was confused. “What do you mean?” she asked. “She shot the porn hooker?”“Stormy,” Trump clarified.While Daniels—who’s said she slept with President Donald Trump in 2006, just months after Melania gave birth to the couple’s son, Barron—has shot pornographic films, there’s no evidence that she was ever a “hooker.” In 2018, Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer, pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations, including paying Daniels $130,000 in hush money a few weeks before the 2016 presidential election. (Trump has denied the affair, although his team’s comments on the payment have been more mixed.)The tape is the latest explosive revelation from Winston Wolkoff, a former confidante and unpaid adviser to the first lady who left the administration in February 2018 and just published the tell-all book “Melania and Me.”Winston Wolkoff recorded about a year’s worth of conversations with Trump, according to the Washington Post, and last week, she released another tape that captured Trump disparaging Christmas and downplaying the conditions facing migrant children at the border.“They say I’m complicit. I’m the same like him. I support him,” Trump can be heard saying in the tape released last week, referring to Donald Trump. “I don’t say enough. I don’t do enough.”“I’m working like a—my ass off on that Christmas stuff,” she continued. “Who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff and decoration? But I need to do it, right?”“I say that I’m working on Christmas planning, planning for the Christmas, and they said, ‘Oh what about the children, that they were separated?’ Give me a fucking break. Where they were saying anything when Obama did that?”Under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, thousands of children are known to have been separated from their parents. Activists were still working to reunite some of those families years after the height of the crisis.In another part of that tape, Trump claims that separated children are still being “taken care of nicely” while in government custody.“The kids, they say, ‘Wow, I will have my own bed? I will sleep on the bed? I will have a cabinet for my clothes?’ It’s so sad to hear it, but they didn’t have that in their own countries; they sleep on the floor,’” she said. “They are taken care of nicely there. But you know, yeah, they are not with parents, it’s sad. But when they come here alone or with coyotes”—human traffickers—“or illegally, you know, you need to do something.”Winston Wolkoff’s contract position with Trump was terminated after the New York Times reported that a firm created by Winston Wolkoff was paid nearly $26 million for event planning connected to Donald Trump’s inauguration and other events.Winston Wolkoff provided a copy of the tape to Hollywood Life after recording a conversation about it with Cohen for his “Mea Culpa” podcast. That conversation took place before the Trumps announced early Friday morning that they had tested positive for the coronavirus, Hollywood Life reported. While Donald Trump was hospitalized Friday, Melania Trump is doing well, according to her spokesperson.In response to a request for comment about the tapes, Stephanie Grisham told VICE News over email, “The first lady is currently recovering from COVID, so that is our focus right now.”In a statement to the Guardian last week, she said, “Secretly taping the first lady and willfully breaking a [non-disclosure agreement] to publish a salacious book is a clear attempt at relevance. The timing of this continues to be suspect—as does this never-ending exercise in self-pity and narcissism.”Daniels did end up appearing in the September 2018 issue of Vogue.
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